Daewoo dock workers now using strength-enhancing exo-skeletons

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Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering has begun live testing a potentially revolutionary exoskeleton that can dramatically increase a worker’s strength and endurance in certain situations. It’s still very much in the testing phase, but this assisted movement system can itself take 60 pounds of pressure or more, making most lifting exercises a breeze for workers. There are also multiple attachments for the basic suit structure, each tailored to a different type of job — so while this might not be the versatile go-anywhere exoskeleton we’d want, its modular nature lets it take on a very wide variety of jobs.

One of the major advantages of a weight-lifting exoskeleton is that, with the actual heavy lifting mostly taken care of, the worker can afford to be much more precise in handling large pieces of equipment. Slowly lowering something into place is much easier when that something weighs 15 pounds, not 75, and despite the gargantuan nature of the ships these suits help to construct, that sort of precision is of paramount importance. Daewoo Shipbuilding, one of almost a dozen offshoots of the former South Korean super-conglomerate, needed a way to increase both the size and precision construction of their container ships — and this could be it.

Right now, the suits can fit people from about 5’3″ to about 6’1″, but they can only run for about three hours on a single battery charge. Increasing this to eight hours shouldn’t be too hard, in the mid-term future, especially with battery technology advancing so far of late. Scaling up will happen along several dimensions though, including lift strength; Daewoo wants the eventual final version to shoulder 200 pounds or more.

This technology is almost certainly inspired by what little information has gone public from the military’s various exoskeleton projects. Most notably, it bears a striking resemblance to DARPA’s Warrior’s Web exosuit, which aims to let soldiers spend all day hiking through mountain ranges with two weeks of supplies on their backs — and to wake up rested the next day. For Daewoo, the incentive is more financial, as these suits could reduce the number of workers needed, improve throughput, reduce injuries and insurance claims — or more likely all three at once.